whereaminow (< 20)

Socialist Medicine Post Deleted

20

What happened? Was it that spammer again? Or did MF pull it. It couldn't be a copyright problem, the Mises Institute gives away its articles for free, nor is this the first time I've posted something from there.

What spammer are you referring to? I also had the impression that Caps was being hacked because in the last 2 days when I open some post my page every now and then gets redirected to that stupid "iamned.com" blog.

Out of all of this debate about healthcare, I still have not heard any real answers to how much this new health care is going to cost me. I have friends that live in europe, and visited many countries over the years, and the socialized nations have huge taxes on their people for the privilage of " free " healthcare. So does anyone know how much the new taxes will be? any guesses?

Percentage of GDP spent on healthcare is the figure to look at. Of course, it can also happen that GDP figures are exaggerated. When that happens you remove the fictitious part of GDP and then run your comparison.

thank you for your comments - really appreciated! I am also blessed with over a hundred e-mails. I wish I could answer everyone /and I'll try to/, but I would like to address the most general comments and observations.

I agree that there are serious cultural differences between countries: it took Russia almost 80 years to destroy the work ethics, trust and responsibility and almost everything else was destroyed afterwards. Even many things which supposedly could not be destroyed were destroyed as well. Good example - the Aral Sea /please Google it - you would be amazed!/.

With us here - it depends on the willingness of many to sell our freedoms for various handouts and bailouts. With this willingness growing so fast there would be not much left to sell very soon.

I agree that in many European countries as well as in Canada there are no dirty needles, odors, cats, and drunken doctors. Their socialized system did not deteriorate so much as there are private property rights in other sectors and there is some competition even in health care itself. Our and their future depends, however, on our ability to preserve market economy, private property and whatever freedoms we have left with.

One of my favorite writers, William Somerset Maugham, wrote in 1941 that " If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that, if it is comfort or money it values more, it will lose that too".